Part 36

We might as well be perfectly frank and perfectly honest with ourselves; it is not an easy task to adjust the relations of ten millions of people who, while they may be mature in passion and perhaps in prejudice, are yet to a large extent children in judgment and in experience, to a race of people not only mature in civilization, but the principles of whose government were based upon more or less mature judgment and experience at the beginning of this nation; and when we take into also account the wide difference in ethnic types of the two races that are here brought together, the problem becomes one of the gravest intricacy that has ever taxed human wisdom and human patience for solution. This situation makes it necessary for the Negro as a race to grasp firmly two or three fundamental elements.

The first is race consciousness.

The Negro must play essentially the primary part in the solution of this problem. Since his emancipation he has conclusively demonstrated to most people that he possesses the same faculties and susceptibilities as the rest of human mankind; this is the greatest victory the race has achieved during its years of freedom. Having demonstrated that his faculties and susceptibilities are capable of the highest development, it must be true of the black race as it has been true of other races, that it must go through the same process and work out the same problem in about the same way as other races have done.

We can and we have profited very much by the examples of progressive races. This is a wonderful advantage, and we have not been slow to grasp it. But we must remember that we are subject to the same natural factor in the solution of this problem, and that it cannot be solved without considering this factor. The Negro must first of all have a conscientious pride and absolute faith and belief in himself. He must not unduly depreciate race distinctions and allow himself to think that, because out of one blood God created all nations of the earth, brotherhood is already an accomplished reality. Let us not deceive ourselves, blighted as we are with a heritage of moral leprosy from our past history and hard pressed as we are in the economic world by foreign immigrants and by native prejudice; our one surest haven of refuge is in ourselves; our one safest means of advance is our belief in and implicit trust in our own ability and worth. No race that despises itself, that laughs at and ridicules itself, that wishes to God it were anything else but itself, can ever be a great people. There is no power under heaven that can stop the onward march of ten millions of earnest, honest, inspired, God-fearing, race-loving, and united people.

Secondly, we must have a high moral ideal.

With a strong race consciousness and reasonable prudence, a people with a low, vacillating, and uncertain moral ideal may, for a time, be able to stem the tide of outraged virtue, but this is merely transitory. Ultimate destruction and ruin follow absolutely in the wake of moral degeneracy; this, all history shows;--this, experience teaches. God visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous all together."

Not long ago I stood in the city of Rome amid its ruined fountains, crumbling walls, falling aqueducts, ancient palaces, and amphitheatres, to-day mere relics of ancient history. One is struck with wonder and amazement at the magnificent civilization which that people was able to evolve. It does not seem possible that the Roman people, who could so perfect society in its organic and civic relations and leave to the world the organic principles which must always lie at the base of all subsequent social development,--it does not seem possible that such a people should so decay as to leave hardly a vestige of its original stock, and that such cities as the Romans erected should so fall as to leave scarcely one stone upon another. Neither does it seem credible that a people who could so work out in its philosophical aspect man's relation to the eternal mystery, and come as near a perfect solution as is perhaps possible for the human mind to reach, that a people who could give to the world such literature, such art, such ideals of physical and intellectual beauty, as did the Greeks, could so utterly perish from the face of the earth; yet this is the case not only with Rome and Greece, but with a score or more of nations which were once masters of the world. The Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, and even God's chosen people, allowed corruption and vice to so dwarf their moral sense that there was, according to the universal law of civilization, nothing left for them but death and destruction.

It is no reproach to the Negro to say that his history and environment in this country have well-nigh placed him at the bottom of the moral scale. This must be remedied, if the Negro is ever to reach his full status of civilized manhood and womanhood. It must come through the united efforts of the educated among us. We must be united to stop the ravages of disease among our people; united to keep black boys from idleness, vice, gambling, and crime; united to guard the purity of black womanhood and, I might add, black manhood also. It is not enough to simply protest that ninety-five out of every hundred Negroes are orderly and law-abiding. The ninety-five must be banded together to restrain and suppress the vicious five.

The people must be impressed with the idea that a high moral character is absolutely essential to the highest development of every race, white quite as much as black. There is no creature so low and contemptible as he who does not seek first the approval of his own conscience and his God; for, after all, how poor is human recognition when you and your God are aware of your inward integrity of soul! If the Negro will keep clean hands and a pure heart, he can stand up before all the world and say, "Doubtless Thou, O Lord, art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us and Israel acknowledge us not."

Thirdly, and lastly, the Negro needs intelligent industry.

Slavery taught the Negro many things for which he should be profoundly thankful--the Christian religion, the English language, and, in a measure, civilization, which in many aspects may be crude in form, but these have placed him a thousand years ahead of his African ancestors.

Slavery taught the Negro to work by rule and rote but not by principle and method. It did not and, perhaps, could not teach him to love and respect labor, but left him, on the contrary, with the idea that manual industry was a thing to be despised and gotten rid of, if possible; that to work with one's hands was a badge of inferiority. A tropical climate is not conducive to the development of practical energy. Add to the Negro's natural tendency his unfortunate heritage from slavery, and we see at once that the race needs especially to be rooted and grounded in the underlying scientific principles of concrete things. The time when the world bowed before merely abstract, impractical knowledge has well-nigh passed; the demand of this age and hour is not so much what a man knows,--though the world respects and reveres knowledge and always will, I hope,--what the world wants to know is what a man can do and how well he can do it.

We must not be misled by high-sounding phrases as to the kind of education the race should receive, but we should remember that the education of a people should be conditioned upon their capacity, social environment, and the probable life which they will lead in the immediate future. We fully realize that the ignorant must be taught, the poor must have the gospel, and the vicious must be restrained, but we also realize that these do not strike the "bed-rock" of a permanent, lasting citizenship.

If the Negro will add his proportionate contribution to the economic aspect of the world's civilization, it must be done through intelligent, well-directed, conscientious, skilled industry. Indeed, the feasible forms of civilization are nothing but the concrete actualization of intelligent thought applied to what are sometimes called common things.

The primary sources of wealth are agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and commerce. These are the lines along which the thoughtful energy of the black race must be directed. I mean by agriculture, farming--the raising of corn, cotton, peas, and potatoes, pigs, chickens, horses, and cows.

Land may be bought practically anywhere in the South almost at our own price. Twenty years hence, with the rapidly developing Southern country and the strenuous efforts to fill it up with foreign immigrants, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for us to buy land. God gave the children of Israel the "Land of Canaan" but, Oh, what a life and death struggle they had to take possession of it and hold on to it. God has given to the Negro here in this Southern country two of the most fundamental necessities in his development--land and labor. If you don't possess this land and hold this labor, God will tell you as He has often told other races--"to move on."

The Creator never meant that this beautiful land should be forever kept as a great hunting-ground for the Indian to roam in savage bliss, but he intended that it should be used. The Indian, having for scores of generations failed to develop this land, God asked the Anglo-Saxon to take possession and dig out the treasures of wheat, corn, cotton, gold and silver, coal and iron, and the poor Indian was told "to move on."

The Negro in Africa sits listlessly in the sunshine of barbarous idleness while the same progressive, indomitable, persevering, white man is taking possession; the same edict has gone forth to the native African--he is being told "to move on."

The same God will tell the white man in America and in Africa, if he does not mete out absolute justice and absolute fairness to his weaker and less-advantaged brother, black or red or brown, if he cannot do justly and love mercy, just as he told the patricians of Rome, he will tell the white man "to move on."

Whatever question there may be about the white man's part in this situation, there is no doubt about ours. Don't let us delude ourselves but keep in mind the fact that the man who owns his home and cultivates his land and lives a decent, self-respecting, useful, and helpful life is no problem anywhere. We talk about the "color line," but you know and I know that the blackest Negro in Alabama or Mississippi or Africa or anywhere else who puts the same amount of skill and energy into his farming gets as large returns for his labor as the whitest Anglo-Saxon. The earth yields up her increase as willingly to the skill and persuasions of the black as of the white husbandman. Wind, wave, heat, stream, and electricity are absolutely blind forces and see no race distinction and draw no "color line." The world's market does not care and it asks no question about the shade of the hand that produces the commodity, but it does insist that it shall be up to the world's requirements.

I thank God for the excellent chance to work that my race had in this Southern country; the Negro in America has a real, good, healthy job, and I hope he may always keep it. I am not particular what he does or where he does it, so he is engaged in honest, useful work. Remember always that building a house is quite as important as building a poem; that the science of cooking is as useful to humanity as the science of music; that the thing most to be desired is a harmonious and helpful adaptation of all the arts and sciences to the glory of God and the good of humanity; that whether we labor with muscle or with brain, both need divine inspiration. Let us consecrate our brain and muscle to the highest and noblest service, to God, and humanity.

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There is no reason why any Negro should become discouraged or morbid. We believe in God; His providence is mysterious and inscrutible; but his ways are just and righteous altogether. Suffering and disappointment have always found their place in divine economy. It took four hundred years of slavery in Egypt and a sifting process of forty years in the "Wilderness" to teach Israel to respect their race and to fit them for entrance into the "Promised Land." The black man has not as yet thoroughly learned to have the respect for his race that is so necessary to the making of a great people. I believe the woes that God has sent him are but the fiery furnace through which he is passing, that is separating the dross from the pure gold, and is welding the Negroes together as a great people for a great purpose.

There is every reason for optimism, hopefulness. The Negro never had more the respect and confidence of his neighbors, black and white, than he has to-day. Neither has he because of his real worth deserved that respect more than he does to-day. Could anybody, amid the inspiration of these grounds and buildings, be discouraged about the future of the Negro? The race problem in this country, I repeat, is simply a part of the problem of life. It is the adjustment of man's relation to his brother, and this adjustment began when Cain slew Abel. Race prejudice is as much a fact as the law of gravitation, and it is as foolish to ignore the operation of one as of the other. Mournful complaint and arrogant criticism are as useless as the crying of a baby against the fury of a great wind. The path of moral progress, remember, has never taken a straight line, but I believe that, unless democracy is a failure and Christianity a mockery, it is entirely feasible and practicable for the black and white races of America to develop side by side, in peace, in harmony, and in mutual helpfulness each toward the other; living together as "brothers in Christ without being brothers-in-law," each making its contributions to the wealth and culture of our beloved country.

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I close with these lines, from an anonymous poet, on "The Water Lily":

"O star on the breast of the river, O marvel of bloom and grace, Did you fall straight down from heaven, Out of the sweetest place? You are white as the thought of the angel, Your heart is steeped in the sun; Did you grow in the golden city, My pure and radiant one?

"Nay, nay, I fell not out of heaven; None gave me my saintly white; It slowly grew in the blackness, Down in the dreary night, From the ooze of the silent river I won my glory and grace; While souls fall not, O my poet, They rise to the sweetest place."